


young immortals (are the first to die)

by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Blanket Permission, Dark, Drowning, Immortality, Immortals, Miraculous Side Effects, Not Really Character Death, Podfic Welcome, Sort Of, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:40:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24109114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails/pseuds/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails
Summary: It all started in September.By the time the following January rolls around, every kid in her class knows what it is like to die.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 95





	young immortals (are the first to die)

**Author's Note:**

> **TW:** major character death (sort of, temporary), suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt, drowning
> 
> Please be careful while reading, guys. This fic deals with a lot of violence and death, and the ramifications of it. It’s not a very happy one.
> 
> **Please let me know if there are other warnings you would like me to tag.**
> 
> (AU where as long as one is in possession of a working miraculous, they cannot die.)

i. The Eiffel Tower fell.

It’s back now, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the Eiffel Tower fell, and that—that is not something that could happen without fatalities.

She checks the news, the reports, asks around a little.

No one is dead.

Or—they were, but the miraculous cure had fixed it.

Marinette swallows, closes out the tabs she had opened on her computer, and very carefully does not think about what this might mean for her, specifically.

ii. Chat is flung face first into a brick wall by an Akuma that’s four hundred and eighty kilos of pure steel and muscle.

He hits it with a sickening crunch, and does not get back up.

His body is a mess of black leather and blood and awkward limbs at even more awkward angles, and she lets out a guttural scream of rage and fights with a ferocity she never has before.

By the time it is over, he’s back on his own two feet again.

The miraculous cure, she dismisses. The miraculous cure, he agrees. The miraculous cure, every reporter and journalist and half-bit blog across the city will come to decree.

Neither of them talk about the terrified look in Chat’s eyes after, or how skittish he is for the next several battles.

A miraculous cure, indeed.

(Or perhaps not.)

iii. Marinette’s turn comes when some guy with sticky fingers and a habit of getting caught (now with even stickier fingers and the ability to summon just about anything to his hold) locks her in a goddamn bank vault.

Without worrying about any bodily functions besides breathing, she might’ve lasted a couple weeks, though it would’ve been hard. Factoring in the inevitable starvation and dehydration, it would’ve likely rounded out to around three days. (She’s done the calculations. It still keeps her up at night, and having these answers—well, it soothes some sort of morbid curiosity, she supposes.)

The only problem: he threw her in the vault, along with many large palettes holding several hundred thousands of euros, as well as records of hundreds of stocks and bonds, and _a goddamn Molotov cocktail_.

Because of course, he would think it was too _easy_ to go after such an obvious target, even though he’d already proven many times that practically _no_ target was _easy_ for him, and _of course_ , he would find that shit _fucking hilarious_.

_Throw Ladybug in with a limited oxygen supply that’s rapidly being burned up, plus smoke, sure, instant party._

Ha bloody _ha_.

She ends up making it forty minutes, which probably would’ve been longer, if not for the smoke inhalation and her screaming herself hoarse yelling for help and running around the room trying to find a way out.

Luckily, she has a great partner, who eventually manages to cataclysm the vault door and then gets the hell out of dodge to restore his kwami as soon as she starts moving.

She chokes-vomits-coughs and lunges to her feet, dangerously off-balanced but already swinging.

She’s not sure how much time she lost in between.

It is the first time.

It is not the last.

iv. “I wasn’t just unconscious earlier, was I?” She asks that night, and Tikki goes uncharacteristically quiet.

Marinette doesn’t try to make eye contact with the kwami because she already knows it’ll be a futile effort. Instead, she continues brushing her hair, her hands shaking only slightly as she keeps her strokes steady, fighting not to have a breakdown. She’s already had two of those today, she doesn’t need another one.

She brushes a little too hard, and the bristles poke through and scrape her neck.

She pauses, and lifts the hair there to reveal pale, utterly average skin. There are no signs of the burns that had wrapped around it only hours earlier, and there never will be.

She breathes deeply, evenly, and reminds herself that she can not afford falling apart even further this week.

“Tikki?” She prompts, not missing the goddess’s lack of an answer.

There’s another long moment of silence, before Tikki finally says, “No. No, you weren’t just unconscious.”

Marinette does not ask the next question and Tikki does not answer it; both are too proud for that, and too scared.

They both know what would’ve been said, anyway.

_Was I dead?_

_Yes._

...so maybe, it’s not the miraculous cure, then. Or, at least, not all of it.

(She so, so wishes it was.)

v. She tests it. Of course she tests it.

This is the kind of thing that is dangerous not to know.

“I’m going to stab myself,” she tells Chat, who is looking less and less sure of this plan by the second. “And you’re going to let me bleed out, and then you’re going to wait. If I don’t get back up, take my miraculous and use the cure. If something goes wrong, go to Master Fu.”

He sucks in a shallow, shuttering breath, and when he nods it looks painful.

She hates not knowing the extent of this.

She hates herself for asking him to do this even more.

But they have to do this.

She has to do this.

_This is the kind of thing that’s dangerous not to know._

So she stabs herself, and he waits, and eventually her eyes flutter open, and when they separate that night, there’s nothing but a puddle of blood and vomit to show that any of it ever happened at all—not even a wound.

vi. It all started in September.

By the time the following January rolls around, every kid in her class knows what it is like to die.

vii. Her mind is not a very pretty place sometimes.

In fact, more often than not, it is a rather cluttered, anxious one.

It’s why she does things like write out all of her friends’ schedules—it helps her keep up with what’s going on in their lives and make sure not to miss important events, yes, but it also makes it a lot easier to make plans, both as a friend and as class president, and it’s a lot easier to have a visual representation of how everyone’s time is going to be blocked out and have it all laid out in front of her so she’s not constantly stressing about having forgotten something or gotten things mixed up.

It’s why she rambles—she gets panicked or nervous or uncomfortable and all of a sudden her brain just locks onto the nearest thing it can grab in the conversation out of some desperate urge of _make it go away make it stop_ , and then she just digs herself a deeper and deeper hole until someone manages to do or say something to take the metaphorical shovel of anxiety out of her hands.

It’s also why it’s so easy to latch onto a single idea sometimes and just not let go. Yes, sometimes she can’t focus on one thing to save her life because her thoughts just won’t _let_ her because there’s so _many_ of them and they’re all moving around so _fast_ and _loud_ , and it’s like she’s trying to find the book she _just put down_ when she hasn’t cleaned her room for three weeks, but sometimes it can also be like she just re-organized her desk and it might be a mess again but she knows where everything _is_ and she just ignores the rest of her room because she doesn’t want to deal with all _that_ , too, and if she just ignores it it can’t get any worse, right? And—the point. The point is that her mind is a very messy place, but sometimes that allows for very clear and obvious paths of thought amidst the chaos, that just never seem to end.

And sometimes those paths of thought are not the greatest.

But they’re there.

And they sure do make a lot of sense when she’s thinking them.

Marinette eyes her shears thoughtfully, absentmindedly running a finger down one of the edges.

“Marinette,” Tikki says. Only it’s not really _Tikki_ , it’s the _goddess_ , and some part of her is aware that Tikki _is_ a goddess and Tikki is _the_ goddess, but another part of her makes a distinct difference between the two. This time, the goddess’s voice is low, and dangerous, and it sounds like a warning.

Marinette’s finger stops moving, and she drags her gaze back to the assignment she’s supposed to be working on, but her hand doesn’t move from where it rests lightly across the handle of the shears.

“Just wondering, Tikki,” she mutters, and buries herself back in the equations before the kwami can probe further.

viii. Her parents are bakers, and they don’t have any employees working for them other than themselves, which means they’re _busy_.

Every day of the week, they wake up long before the sun rises, work all day, close the business, clean the whole shop, prep for the next day, and more often than not are in bed before the sun sets again.

But, sometimes, just every once in a while, they make exceptions, things they block out weeks if not months in advance, for just one or two days where they don’t have to work.

And when they know they have a day where they don’t have to worry about things being set up properly for tomorrow or having to get up early to start baking, they sometimes take advantage of that in the form of date nights.

The thing is, her parents plan things like this weeks in advance, so Marinette _knows_ about it weeks in advance, and there’s this thought that’s been sitting in her throat, cramping her lungs, and it’s rash and raw and impulsive and _not a good idea_ , but she’s feeling rash and raw and impulsive more and more often these days and bad ideas are the only ones she can hold in her mouth long enough to swallow because the good ones never taste like blood.

So she waits for date night, double then triple checks the time they’ll be back, waits more for the inevitable _one last thing I almost forgot_ that they come back to get, makes sure all her friends know that she’s not going to be home tonight because she has plans with her Nonna outside of the city, even though she hasn’t talked to her Nonna in what feels like years.

Then she strips until she’s only in her underthings and a pair of exercise pants that won’t weigh down when they get wet, goes upstairs, fills the tub, sets her phone on the vanity with the stopwatch ready to be set, and makes sure Tikki is clear on the plan, no matter how vehemently she objects to it.

And then she sits down in the water—icy cold because she can’t stand the taste of it warm and she needs to be _awake_ for this, needs to _know_ —takes a shaky breath, gives a nod to Tikki, and slowly lowers herself into the water, a suitcase of stones she’d been picking up since she found out about the date night sitting on her chest because she couldn’t find any cinderblocks.

The water covers her face. She can barely move, barely breathe.

Tikki starts the timer.

(And Marinette finds that she can finally _scream_.

The water swallows it all.)

(She drowns a lot quicker than she burned, and when she wakes up Tikki has to transform her to help her get the suitcase off, because she’s not strong enough as Marinette, that was the whole _point_ , but that was okay, that was the _plan_.)

(So she can come back in her civilian form, too.)

(She loses four hours, that time, according to the stopwatch.)

ix. It all started in September.

By the time May rolls around, the suicide rate of the city of Paris has tripled.

x. Within the first eight months of being Ladybug, Marinette dies a total of forty-two times.

By the time she turns fifteen, she’s lost count.

xi. At the beginning of all this, it had been all abstract concepts. Creation. Destruction. Magic. Villains and heroes, and the things they could do to one another.

At the beginning, it had all seemed absurd, like some elaborate scheme set up to prank the whole city, or a daydream or a fairy tail or simply a very dedicated group of cosplayers.

At the beginning, they hadn’t thought it all out, hadn’t considered the implications; hadn’t been ready to reach the conclusions that were there waiting for them.

At the beginning.

But this isn’t the beginning anymore, and they know better now.

There is no creation and destruction and magic and villains and heroes. The people are not so stupid as to cling to those things anymore.

There is phantom pain from injuries that by all accounts never happened, and scars that ache where there is only smooth skin.

There is death, and the dubious pleasure of returning from it.

The people have seen them run through broken bones, fight with half their guts hanging out, punch each other in the face and throw each other into the Seine and walk away with a blown kiss and a wink and a smile that still somehow says _you’re my best friend._

The people have seen them walk off being thrown through walls, burned alive, having their throats slit.

The people have seen more than enough.

Eventually, there comes a point where they can’t pretend they haven’t anymore.

Alya’s old _Ladyblog_ posts begin to make the rounds again—the ones about the exhibit, about The Pharaoh and how thousands and thousands of years ago Ladybug was fighting and how she’s _still fighting_.

 _Goddess,_ Alya had said, half joking and half not, having seen the front lines very close very soon and having been the first to start seeing the situation for what it was, before anyone else, and that word starts to make the rounds again, too, brings up other things, brings up _warrior angel_ and _guardian_ and _Other_ and _immortal_ and _not us, not quite, not human_ and Marinette _aches_ because she’s not sure if any of them are true or not and this is one of those things that Tikki won’t talk to her about.

The rest of the world thinks Paris is still a paradise, thinks the videos and pictures are edited, thinks it’s a publicity stunt, thinks that tourists who come back and claim otherwise with a tremor in their voice and a terror in their eyes that wasn’t there before just ate something funny, or got real shitfaced and did some stupid things and that was enough to stay with them in the form of some horrid fever dream, and that’s fine; they like it that way.

Let the world think Paris is a paradise, and by god leave them alone to pick up their own messes, because once things like _immortal hero_ reach the wrong ears, nothing good will happen, and Paris protects their own; Paris protects Ladybug and Chat Noir.

Because in the end, it doesn’t matter whether the duo is human or not.

Not really.

Perhaps one day everyone else will wisen up and try to take them away, but the entire city and every person in it will burn to the ground before they let them.

It’ll be nothing they haven’t done before.

xii. Buzzfeed France posts a _Which Miraculous Holder Are You_ quiz.

One of the questions is _What is your least favorite way to die?_

Everyone else sees it as capitalizing on the popularity of these fun characters that seemingly popped out of nowhere, and the aforementioned question as hyperbole; or perhaps they meant _What_ would _be your least favorite way to die?_

(No.

They knew what they were doing, knew what they were saying, knew what they were implying.

Others see it as hyperbole, misunderstanding, a mistake, but the Parisians _know_ , and quietly fill in the correct answers, trying not to think about the memories attached to them.

It’s rather telling, that they have favorites for that sort of thing these days.)

xiii. The third time Marinette gives Nino a miraculous is also the first time he dies with it.

Meaning, the first time he’s come back without the cure being responsible for it. She does not know what it is like to be brought back by the cure herself, but from the things she’s heard, she imagines that it’s an entirely different breed from what she’s used to, and if anything, his reaction proves it.

When she goes to collect it afterward, he hands the box back to her with wide, wide eyes and fingers that shake so much he almost drops it, and then swallows thickly, and says, “This wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

She gives a wry, awful smile that she knows cracks around the edges, and marvels at how horrible of a friend she is, to have ever thought it was okay to bring her friends into this any more than they already were.

“It never is.”

(Unlike Nino, Alya never says anything, because she’s been watching long enough to know that even the grit and grime the world sees sometimes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

There is no vindication in knowing that she was right.)

xiv. It all started in September.

By the time next September rolls around, she has more and more experiments lined up, more things, ideas, theories to test, because she must’ve died a thousand times by now and she’s not sure if the time between _dead_ and _undead_ is getting longer or shorter but it’s sure doing _something_ and she’s going to keep dying and dying until she gets her answers.

(It never quite occurs to her that she’s only a kid, and maybe she should be using all that time trying to live, instead.)

xv. She drops by the hotel, sometimes, to visit Jagged and Fang and Penny when they’re in town, and more than once during those visits she’s seen Chloé kick up a fuss or throw a tantrum and either take it all out on her butler or leave him to clean up the mess left after.

Finally, she cracks, and, after the blonde makes a truly thunderous exit, turns to the man calmly restoring order after the hurricane that just blew through, and asks him why he doesn’t find work somewhere else.

He tells her that the Bourgeois family pays a handsome figure, and someday, when there is not a Ladybug around to save the day, when no magic cure comes, when his death arrives and finally sticks and he doesn’t have to deal with the aftermath of it one more time, all of that handsome figure will be going to his family, and he can very well put up with a spoiled teenager and her mood swings until then.

That’s not the full story, she can tell, but everything he said felt true enough, so she figures that this part of it is the best she’s going to get, and lets it be.

It unnerves her that he has already started planning for the day he dies—that he does not speak of doing so because he is an adult and he should be prepared for the eventuality, or because he’s worried about some accident, or health complications, but that he attributes the plans solely to the veritable magic war raging in their streets day in and day out, that has claimed so many before and that he believes will be the thing that will finally claim him, with no refunds, no returns; that he says _when_ and not _if_ this fight that he’s not even really a part of will kill him.

It unnerves her how flippantly he talks about it, like he doesn’t care one way or the other, but is just waiting for the day it happens, and until then, it will entertain him well enough to simply plan for his (real) inevitable death.

It makes her wonder if she should start planning for hers.

xvi. Anxiety towards the _next_ and the _now_ comes around, because people are asking if she’s been thinking about what she’s going to do after she graduates yet, if she’s researched the possibilities at all, and as it all comes to a head at once, she sits at her computer and hesitates.

 _Which first?_ She taps her pen against her desk thoughtfully.

She’s thought about the future before, sometimes, a little bit—schools she vaguely noted to look into, information for a few different scholarships scribbled in her notebooks somewhere, ideas about which majors and degrees she might want to try for.

She’s also thought about what might happen if Hawk Moth gets her miraculous, and she dies, and can’t be brought back. She’s wondered if when they kill Hawk Moth (and she’s thought about this, too—they _will_ kill him, because he must be the only person in Paris who has not died before and that is _his fault_ and what is justice if they only serve the first course?), and then after, when they take his miraculous, if they’ll have to give theirs back to the Guardian. She’s wondered if, either way, when all is said and done, she’ll just die anyway, because this miraculous war will finally be over and whatever magic has been keeping her from splitting at the seams for so long will have no reason to do so anymore.

And in that uncertainty lies a problem.

So.

_Plans for university, or plans for if I die?_

She’s only fifteen.

These are the choices she has to make.

xvii. Marinette Dupain-Cheng greets sixteen by throwing herself off a bridge.

A few hours later, she walks out of the river below it, soaking wet and completely unscathed.

_Just a test, it’s just a test._

Tikki looks at her, long and hard and the most intense she’s been in ages.

Marinette very carefully does not meet her eye.

She’s had practice with it, after all.

This is not her first test.

_Just a test just a test just a test–_

xviii. It all started in September.

But it keeps going, and it doesn’t stop.

**Author's Note:**

> might come back to this? who knows tbh
> 
> what is hopefully coming next, with at least one before july if all goes well:  
> • a revamp of behind the scenes bc it physically pains me to look at it as-is  
> • peter pevensie at hogwarts  
> • black paladin hunk garrett  
> • the incredibles + wwii
> 
> what is probably _actually_ going to come next, most likely mid-2021, if at all:  
> • clint barton and natasha romanoff at corn fest
> 
> i mean  
> we’ll see, won’t we?
> 
>  ***** Marinette’s birthday is in July, or somewhere near there  
>  ****** if you don’t think fifteen year olds are pressured into trying to make all their plans for college/university perfect even though they’re still years from graduating then have you ever been a teenager? If the answer is yes and you still don’t think it happens then where are you from I want to live there  
>  ******* yes, Buzzfeed does have offices in France—in Paris, in fact, so that works out well. Not sure if they also do quizzes, but for the sake of this fic I’m saying they do  
>  ******** I hope this was clear, but the second “test” she runs where she drowns herself is meant to be a test of if she’ll also be brought back even if she’s not transformed.  
>  ********* I also hope _this_ was clear, but just in case: the miraculous cure heals injuries and reverses deaths from akuma attacks. However, anyone who has a working miraculous (meaning broken ones like the Peacock won’t do this, especially since that one is actually actively hurting and even killing its user) is unable to die because the miraculous will keep bringing them back. Also, the miraculous only does this when they _have_ them. So when the temporary heroes like Alya and Nino get a miraculous, yeah, they’re absolutely brought back without needing the cure. But as soon as they give that miraculous _back_ after the fight is over, the miraculous magic stops working on them, and they depend on the cure and basic common sense to keep them alive just like every other citizen of Paris until they’re given the miraculous once more. It is also a vastly different experience to the cure—the cure undoes everything like it never even happened, versus the miraculous which, yes, essentially does the same thing, but instead of gently unraveling whatever threads of magic and time it needs to, it forcibly brings the miraculous user back and rips them back into the world of the living. Idk how to describe it. Just—the cure is very gentle, in comparison, and the miraculous are much harsher. So, yes, they’re very different. But this also means that the miraculous users don’t have to rely on one of their own—who could very well die as well—to stay alive. If one of them drops during a fight, they can come back and keep helping out if they need to. It might take a while, and it’ll definitely suck, but they _can_. This is really important, because otherwise Ladybug could easily die and stay dead, and whoops, no more cure, death counts suddenly jacking up by the dozens or hundreds or even thousands depending on the akuma of the day, millions of euros worth of property damage, anyone who was mind controlled or changed or imprisoned stay that way until further notice. Yeah, the heroes kind of need to not have to rely on the cure.
> 
> [come yell at me on tumblr :)](https://ink-beneath-her-fingernails.tumblr.com/)


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